Lesbian-Betrayal-Industrial-Complex: Hitchcock's 'Suspicion', Arzner's 'Merrily We Go to Hell'
A scattered, comparative lesbian reading
Much has already been written on Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), a typically hyper-suspenseful film about a tortured marriage where the wife (Lina, played by Joan Fontaine) is convinced that her lying, gambling husband (Aysgarth, Cary Grant) is harbouring morbid intentions. Although I felt parts of it paled in comparison to Rebecca, made the year prior (the scenery is not as striking, the buildup not as subtle), it still endures as an example of what the director does best: neat and compact woman’s pictures featuring hidden underbellies of twisted desire and corruption.
I recognise the futility of commenting on its tense buildup (it’s Hitchcock) or letdown ending, and I’m going to discuss it instead (in a scattered manner, because my thoughts are everywhere) in opposition to a similar film made nine years prior, Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell.
Arzner has gained some recognition for being one of the only female directors of Hollywood’s studio era - the only female director, in fact, active in Hollywood until 1943 (when she retired). She was also an open lesbian, something which will be relevant later. While discussions of her career are commonplace, it’s difficult to find much scholarly analysis of her work itself, which I sadly found out when I was researching Merrily We Go to Hell. The film stars Sylvia Sidney as Joan, a rich girl who finds herself in love with a drunken, penniless playwright (Jerry, played by Fredric March), and struggles when their relationship is invaded by a third party, Claire (Adrienne Allen). Merrily’s desperate depictions of alcoholism and joblessness are exacerbated by, possibly fuelled by, the Great Depression (in its third year in 1932). They are mirrored in Suspicion, a film made in a different, but by no means less anxious climate: Aysgarth conceals his poverty until safely inside his lavish house with his new wife, loses a job to pay off his gambling debts and squanders new winnings on needless luxury: fur coats and hats for the hemmed-in Lina, hard liquor for a best friend capable of drinking himself to death.
Jerry appears to struggle along with Joan in Merrily, hopelessly sympathetic to her new plight of poverty until he is corrupted by the charms of a new love interest, a woman starring in his play. In Suspicion, Aysgarth is apparently driven to evil at first by monetary greed, but later by an invisible, murderous force. This force is dismissed by a self-proclaimed arbiter of evil, a local crime writer who collects law books and hosts dinner parties with her androgynous girlfriend. The matter-of-fact lesbianism of this character, who acts as the central junction of the film (she brings Lina closer to Aysgarth, she advises her on criminal history, she is apparently able to spot evil) is not lost in the mire of suspense. She is a neutral party, set free from heterosexual meddlings. The wheels turn around her.
Both cinematic dimensions cloak evil and corruption in a sheath of luxury. Lina in Suspicion starts out as a drab equestrian and gradually, as she grows closer to what may be a criminal conspiracy, becomes tangled in silk (the bedsheets of her unaffordable home) and glitter (the jewels on her later costumes, wrapping around her like claws):
These embellishments are the suspicion that poisons Lina’s marriage: her new clothes, bought with Aysgarth’s gambling winnings, turn her against her will into a being so sleek and fashionable that she surpasses her initially idealistic wife-role and becomes something outside of a traditional coupling all together. Just like the female crime writer’s female partner:
The other woman in Merrily We Go to Hell, played by Adrianne Allen,acts out this role for the central couple. Her sparkly, cosmopolitan androgyny undermines preconceived ideals of marriage for both husband and wife, leading the man to adultery and his bride to a mixture of envy and (subtextual) attraction.
Allen’s portrayal verges into a lesbian manifestation of camp - she is polished, refined and ageless, and an actress-within-an-actress, capable of slithering into whichever role is needed. I see her mirrored almost exactly in Delphine Seyrig’s lesbian vampire, the homoerotic turning point of 1971’s Daughters of Darkness:
Cary Grant (Aysgarth in Suspicion) is Allen’s male equivalent, cutting a precisely-shadowed Leyendecker-esque profile and always not-quite pretending: a ‘husband’, not a husband. Perhaps the high proximity of these stylised figures to extreme evil and ruin says something about each film’s climate: a scheming, self-serving actress is a hindrance in the Great Depression, and a secretive stranger would have posed extreme dangers in wartime Britain.
I wasn’t going to analyse Arzner’s big climactic 1930s house party scene in detail, but all I could think of when watching was ‘Oh my god, this director is a lesbian and she has the same taste in women as I do’. I (sidenote) think that the backless, loosely-draped dresses of this era are an aid to lesbian sexuality specifically: they highlight broad, strong female figures. Perhaps this is just aesthetic debris from whatever the flowing garments were that Sappho et al. wore in Archaic Greece, washing up helpfully in the twentieth century. Anyway: Arzner’s lesbian gaze is really obvious in these scenes (muscular female backs, ambiguous longing), and it’s telling that by the end, Joan’s husband has passed out drunk, leaving her frustrated with her marriage.
Lina, in Suspicion, never even has a chance to subtextually ponder ‘going to the other side’; she is caught up increasingly in the pure confusion of male secrecy and evil, something her lesbian confidante has already studied to mastery.
I don’t have a huge final conclusion from watching and comparing these two films: just that a) adultery storylines have a lot of potential for homosexual subtext (see Katherine Mansfield’s short story, Bliss!), and this might be extended to other former crimes, b) in times of war and depression, the connotations of glitter may vary, c) the androgynous-evil-homosexual-camp figure is nearly a constant. Also: Hitchcock has far more to offer female (and lesbian) viewers than is usually assumed.